Chinese Stocks Fall As Hong Kong Warns ‘Rising Rates Are Unavoidable’

Mainland equities tumbled ahead of the latest read on GDP from the engine of global growth and trade. The number will come on the heels of the trade data we got last week which betrayed a surprise deficit, the first since February of 2017. That was summarily written off to seasonal effects. As far as GDP goes, “we’ll see what happens” – to use a Trump-ism:

In Hong Kong, it looks like the ongoing efforts to defend the HKD band might be weighing on sentiment. The HKMA has spent something like $1.7 billion over the past several days to keep this from breaking and that seems to suggest there’s more pressure here than a lot of folks expected.

The Hang Seng fell 1.6% to start the week and H-shares were off by more than 2%:

Clearly, the risk is that liquidity tightens up and rates rise as the HKMA copes with persistent pressure on the currency and the worry is that that ends up cascading and undermining the country’s property market, with God only knows what ramifications for the rest of the local economy.

If you’re super interested in this, city financial secretary Paul Chan penned a blog post over the weekend that we’ll excerpt below for you to peruse at your leisure.